Source: New York Times (NY) Author: Diana Jean Schemo Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Pubdate: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 COLOMBIAN COCA CROPS INCREASE DESPITE U.S. EFFORTS POPAYAN, Colombia -- At first, nothing could have been easier for these struggling rural hamlets than getting into the drug business. Up and down the Valle del Cauca these scattered villages climbed on the coca bandwagon early, enjoying a five-year joyride that is still referred to here to as La Bonanza. But as more and more farmers grew coca instead of food, prices for coca leaf dropped, and the cost of the food they had to buy soared. Crop-dusters financed by American anti-drug efforts poisoned the harvest. And gradually, the problems that cocaine has fueled in urban ghettos -- violence, shattered families and an addiction to easy money reached back to the valley like a curse returning to its roots. As life unraveled, the coca growers learned that although Colombia was spending $1.1 billion a year fighting drug trafficking, and Washington was pouring more than $100 million a year into Colombia's anti-narcotics police, hardly any of that money was available to help communities stop growing illegal crops. Washington's strategy in Colombia, where some 80 percent of the cocaine sold in the United States originates, never included the kind of highly effective programs in Bolivia and Peru that have helped peasants raise alternative crops. Indeed, while drug crops in Bolivia and Peru -- where fumigation is banned - -- have continued to fall, the world's leading producer of coca last year was Colombia, where fumigation is Washington's weapon of choice. "It's ironic and disturbing that the one country where you have massive aerial eradication is the one where you've got an increase in coca production," said Coletta Youngers, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit policy research organization. "There's something fundamentally wrong there." (After two years of imposing sanctions on Colombia for failing to enforce drug laws, the Clinton administration announced on Thursday that it would grant a waiver to Colombia this year as an acknowledgment that it is making progress in destroying crops. But the results have not been encouraging. Last year, Colombian pilots poisoned 40,000 hectares of coca crops in the most intense program ever, and yet the total area under coca cultivation rose nearly 20 percent.) Far from the hardscrabble roads where peasants live all but forgotten by their government, Washington formulates policies to reduce drug trafficking by attacking bridges, blowing up labs and poisoning crops. The strategy's limited successes are trumpeted widely. But less well known is the way the policy affects the peasants who took up illegal crops in a Faustian bargain to join the middle class. "They confuse us with the Cali or Medellin cartel," said Eider Gironza Mamian, a coca grower whose community is weighing the prospects of ending coca cultivation. "Maybe they think we're rich, too, but in reality, we're poor. And our children go hungry." Under President Ernesto Samper, whose relations with Washington have been plagued with accusations that Cali drug dealers bankrolled his election, the Colombian government has tried to promote crop substitution with aid from the European Community and the United Nations. But the dearth of help from the United States has sown deep bitterness among Colombians. Indeed, U.S. officials at the Bank for Inter-American Development recently voted against a $90 million loan to boost crop substitution in Colombia, an automatic consequence of Washington's decertification of Colombia over the past two years as a partner in the fight against drug trafficking. At the same time, the U.S. anti-narcotics funding for Latin America's military and police more than tripled between 1996 and 1997, according to a report by the Washington Office on Latin America. Most of the money goes for shooting down planes transporting coca leaves or paste to Mexico and Colombia from Bolivia and Peru, destroying crops and seizing drugs bound for the United States. Still, the seizure of tens of thousands of tons of heroin and cocaine between 1988 and 1995, and the destruction of about 135,000 acres of coca had "made little impact on the availability of illegal drugs in the United States and on the amount needed to satisfy U.S. demand," according to a 1997 report by the General Accounting Office. One State Department official said that in the 1980s the Bush administration offered the Andean nations crop-substitution programs along with military and police aid to battle drug smuggling. While Peru and Bolivia were interested in the alternative-crop idea, the Colombian military and police traded agricultural aid for increased military assistance, the official said. Officially, the U.S. government has no plans to switch tactics in Colombia. In a statement, Randall Beers, acting assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, defended fumigation as "the most cost-effective way to reduce narcotics substances, particularly in areas not under control of the central government." One State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the emphasis on fumigating crops was likely to intensify. "The feeling is very strong to push on in Colombia, regardless of what the results are," the official said. The rationale was that fumigation could succeed if applied more thoroughly, and neither the Colombian nor the U.S. government wanted to shower agricultural programs on regions believed to be under guerrilla influence. For the Colombian military, the resumption of U.S. anti-drug aid is being eagerly awaited as a boost in the undeclared war against leftist guerrillas, the chief of the combined armed forces, Gen. Manuel Jose Bonnet, said in an interview. In recent years, the political breakdown in Colombia has weakened the traditional ties of peasants to the land. Civil strife pitting the army and landowner-financed paramilitary groups against leftist guerrillas, and the purchase of vast tracts of farmland by drug barons, has displaced an estimated 1.2 million Colombians from rural areas, according to human-rights organizations here. Since the country's economic opening in the early 1990s, promoted by the United States, thousands of small farmers in Colombia have gone out of business, unable to compete with the world prices for corn, rice, and other grains, said Juan Manuel Ospina, president of the Colombian Farmers' Society. Many families displaced by the upheaval have drifted to remote frontiers and grow coca where the lack of roads is not a problem. For coca and poppy, traffickers fly into clandestine airstrips. Abigail Velazco, a 41-year-old Guambiare Indian who grew poppy in the mountains outside Popayan, said drug dealers first appeared after a disease had destroyed the tribe's potato and onion harvest. If the importance of an agriculture extension service in the remote mountains of the Guambiare had not occurred to the government, the same could not be said of the drug dealers. Velazco said the first trafficker, a North American who went by a name that sounded like Don Ever, supplied seeds, fertilizer, four months of groceries and a pledge to buy the harvest for a set price. "It started out with only a few people growing wild poppies," said Francisco Muelas, the tribal chief's agricultural adviser. "After that, flowers started appearing everywhere." Before long, 70 percent of the 13,500 Guambiare had given up raising food crops to grow poppy for the traffickers, cutting down forest to do so. Like the lowland Colombians growing coca, the Guambiare saw the fabric of their culture -- respect for nature, families and the head of the tribe -- fray amid the influx of money, strangers and violence. "The community said: 'Look, we're destroying ourselves. Why don't we pick up our traditions, recover our way of life?' " Muelas said. Pushed by their leader, the community presented the government with a "Plan of Life" to help the Guambiare give up drugs. It was not easy, admitted Muelas. Some tribesmen threatened the leader's life, and a letter purporting to be from the local commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest Marxist guerrilla group, warned the tribe not to stop growing poppy. But the tribe's reaction was an unusual demonstration of its conviction and courage: It selected a group to trek up the mountain and explain the "Plan of Life." After talking, the guerrillas denied having made any threat, and pledged not to interfere in the tribe's switch to legal crops. Though officials in Washington said guerrillas in Colombia are an impediment to government crop-substitution efforts, Juan Carlos Palou, the director of Plante, Colombia's crop-substitution program, said no farmer has ever been killed for giving up illicit crops. Now the Guambiares' program, backed by some financing from the Colombian government, is a showcase for crop substitution. Fields where poppy had been growing are planted with corn, onions and beans. The tribe is raising 500 chickens. The Guambiares built an aqueduct to divert water from a nearby river to a fish hatchery, where they are raising trout from eggs imported from California. They have cleared the forest around a highland lake where they plan to build a fishing resort. A rudimentary factory makes concrete blocks to build houses. Measuring the success is tricky, because crops abandoned in the Valle may pop up under the Amazon canopy where they are harder to eradicate. It is slow work turning around a community's decay against a continuing increase in both coca production and fumigation. "Nobody ever calls the hard line into question on the basis of results," Palou said. "But people are always asking for results when you take a mild line." Success comes slowly, measured in a region's permanent switch to legal crops as the government builds credibility among its citizens.